To the extent that I have failed to make it clear that I was addressing exagerations in Patterson’s essay, and worse allowed rhetorical florishes to lead me to explicitly overstep this limit, I apologise.
I am curious however to see Carl Sagan rather than Washington Irving blamed for the Flat Earth myth. The fact that this myth, and specifically the Columbus variant of it in school textbooks, predates Sagan’s show and book would suggest otherwise. (I am not defending the eggregious History of Science errors Sagan made however.) The issue seems to have more to do with a hypertrophied willingness to accept, and pass on, valorised and mythologised versions of American History (yes, I know, I’m a broken record on this point, but nobody seems willing to address it).
I have documented Patterson’s exagerations both on this thread, and on the Conflict Thesis thread (with further, if self-censored, followup here). One thing I have come to notice is that Patterson seems unwilling to let his sources condemn themselves ‘out of their own mouths’ – the maligning of Christianity seems to be always in Patterson’s own words (“A main culprit in this debacle of the human spirit was the Church”, “The Church set science back centuries”, “perpetuate the idea that Christians because of the flat earth, and now six-day creationism, have always opposed science in the majority”), and Patterson’s wording always casts Christianity in a worse light than his sources in fact do.